Since the early 1990's, the number of people using the World Wide Web has grown at a substantial rate. As more users take advantage of the World Wide Web, higher volumes of traffic are generated over the Internet. Because the benefits of commercializing the Internet to take advantage of these higher traffic volumes can be tremendous, businesses increasingly seek means to advertise their products or services on-line. These advertisements may appear, for example, in the form of leased advertising space (e.g., “banners”) on websites or as advertisements presented to digital television users, which are comparable to rented billboard space or to commercials broadcasted during television or radio programs.
When a company advertises on a website, it may benefit from the volume of advertisements or impressions that it places on the website, the number of users that select or “click” on each advertisement, and the number of sales or other “conversions” that result from each display of an advertisement. Each instance that an advertisement is placed on a web page may be referred to as an “impression.” Companies may pay per impression, per click, and/or per conversion. As a result, it may be advantageous for advertisers to increase the number of web pages on which companies may display advertisements.
Traditionally, advertising services acquired an inventory of empty ad space on particular known web sites, such as news sites and commerce sites, which could then be offered to companies based on the desirability of advertising on the particular web site. Recently, there has been a significant increase in the quantity of user-generated content (“UGC”) sites, on which a large proportion of the site's content is created and posted by users, rather than administrators or professional contributors. For example, there has been a significant increase in social networking sites, blogs, review sites, file sharing sites, and personal opinion sites. Because these sites are growing in number and drawing more web traffic, it is becoming more desirable to advertise on these sites. However, many advertisers are hesitant to have ad networks display their ads on UGC sites that could have offensive or objectionable material posted thereon by users. For example, a children's media provider may desire to display ads on a high-traffic, house pet-related MySpace page, but not on a high-traffic, gambling-related MySpace page. In the past, advertising services have been unable to distinguish between particular pages of a web site (e.g., between two different pages on MySpace.com), when offering ad inventory to content-sensitive advertisers.
The present disclosure is directed to increasing the amount of advertising on web sites by solving one or more of the above-mentioned challenges.